Technical Abstract: Amidst increasing workloads and static or declining budgets, both public and private land management agencies face the need to adapt resource-monitoring techniques or risk falling behind on resource monitoring volume and quality with old techniques. Image analysis of nadir plot images, acquired with common digital cameras, can be manually analyzed for cover using free software. In a comparison between the point intercept (PI) and image-analysis techniques, we found that precision (repeatability) across users was about the same, cover measurements were often different and the image analysis technique took only a third as long to complete. We conclude that image analysis has several advantages over the PI method: images are a permanent record of the resource that can be reanalyzed if data are questioned, if software improves, or if management objectives change; image analysis is quicker and less subject to biases from moving vegetation, moving pointer devices, and bright vegetation color.